


Aftermath

by sandarenu



Category: Snowpiercer (2013)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 13:49:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1650869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandarenu/pseuds/sandarenu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ringing in her ears doesn't stop and the whiteness hurts her eyes, and Yona can't remember a time she was craving a block of cronol under her nose more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta-ed. This film is haunting me.

 

     The ringing in her ears doesn't stop and the whiteness hurts her eyes, and Yona can't remember a time she was craving a block of cronol under her nose more.

     Timmy is a stoic little figure a few metres ahead of her. He's staring at the spot the polar bear had been, transfixed and overwhelmed, a five-year-old kid with all the curiosities and questions that had been squashed down inside the train engine fighting to burst out of him. For now though, he's quiet. Yona doesn't think he's crying, doesn't think he understands that everyone is probably gone.

     Her fingers are itching. The white's starting to bleed to blue, the way the withdrawal tends to bleach everything into shorter wavelengths and higher pitched sounds. Everything that used to be numb is assaulting her senses now. The gravity of the situation hits her, presses down on her narrow bony shoulders and turns up the pain inside her nose. She sits down in the snow and doesn't move for a long time, not until Timmy turns around, his young face pained, and she hears what his voice sounds like for the first time.

 

"Mummy!"

 

     High and fleeting and gut-wrenching, he repeats the word again, vowels stumbling around the tears that suddenly fill his big eyes. For a moment she’s terrified he’s running straight at her, calling at her, until he's stumbling past her, little limbs flailing as his feet try to find solid ground under thick snow and his face scrunched up in sorrow, teardrops freezing on his cheeks.

     She gets up to follow him and falls back down in pain. The pins and needles in her leg are flaring up from the nerves that fell asleep while she was still. When Timmy's face re-emerges from the door, pure shock in his eyes, she ignores the pain to get to him as fast as she can. He drags her in by the sleeve, stumbling past the door into what must be where they had stood. There is an enormous encasing of metal, twisted and charred like a beast, long jarred ends of what must be the engine exposed, guts of bolts and wrenches spilled out everywhere.

     The only thing out of place is the pale hand sticking out from underneath a cocoon of folded metal and rubble.

     Yona stares at it for a second, dulled from the craving of her drug, untrusting of her own vision, wants to close Timmy's eyes because maybe this is what scared him, a dead body underneath the engine he used to be part of. She wonders why she can't cry. Which is when she realizes she isn't imagining the twitching. She isn't hallucinating, because everything else isn't moving jerkily like the hand is. And it is, shaking the way her dad's fingers do around a cigarette, fingers craving for something to hold on to.

     Without thinking, (to be honest, she's a cronol junkie and a train baby, the concept of fear was shut down in her brain the day she was born), she kneels down and grabs the twitching hand with her own.

Its bloodied, dirty fingers close quickly to grip hers.

     She screams soundlessly, feels her heart jumping out of her chest. The hand doesn't loosen up. It's a right hand, she realises, larger than hers, someone's right handed, vice-like grip is closing in on her spider-thin fingers like a crowd rush. Someone was miraculously alive underneath the wreckage.

     Timmy makes the first desperate move to pry the metal off, letting off a small noise of annoyance and then a whimper of pain when a sharp corner cuts across his little palm, and he comes away with blood.

"No!" Yona tells him forcefully. "No, Timmy, don't! Don't touch!"

     She gets him behind her, gestures that he hold his palm tightly with his other hand so the bleeding stops. She then tries to pry her fingers out of the crushing grip, and forces a pinky finger to unravel. The rest of the fingers unravel too quickly, perhaps the strength garnered during a moment of hope deflated and the adrenalin rush subsided. (Her Dad had told her about adrenaline when she was little, about how lucky she would never to have to feel it, about how cronol blocked their senses so they'd get less of it the more they sniffed).

     The hand paws weakly outwards at empty air, fingers working desperately to find the connection again. After a second, it seems to give up, and falls back down onto the floor, twitching as it did before.

 Yona knows desperation when she sees it.

     She grabs a long pipe-like structure from the rubble and starts beating _up_ at the folds of metal over the hand. The fallen structure is very strong, but a particularly hard ‘ _thwack!’_ creates a dent in the sheet, and the fold of metal cracks a bit, brittle from the quick exposure to the harsh cold outside the train. She pushes at the crack then, and falls back in shock because it's so cold, the huge chunk of metal conducting the heat away from her frail body so fast it opens up cold sores at the tips of her fingers. She pulls up and twists her coat so the edge that would normally fall near her knees can act as a buffer, and pushes against the crack again. She tries to pry it apart and is only met with a resistance that feels like a solid wall of force. Timmy lines up behind her and pushes up against her back, one-handed, and is as winded up and breathless as she is within seconds.

     She suddenly remembers Dad and Curtis saving them (she’s been told this is how memory works with cronol; you forget something and remember it in vivid clarity for just minutes at a time) and Yona feels the verge of something she's never felt before, adrenaline and panic, crushing, pee-her-pants panic because this could be Dad, it could be him, he could be alive-

     She realises immediately, even in the blue-blind colour she's seeing the world through in her state, that the hand is too pale, too big. The nubs of its fingers aren't covered in blue-green grime from decades of cronol use. The hand she'd held before hadn't felt like her father’s.

     Yona wants to cry. Wants to run out into the snow outside and forget this, drag Timmy out and tell him, tough and unkind in a way she's never been, that they're the only ones alive. _Mum isn't alive, Dad isn't alive. Nobody made it, nobody._

     There was no cronol numbing her to the reality of things anymore. _We were doomed then, we're doomed now. They're all dead. And we are too._

     The hand pushes up and reaches again, heartachingly hopeful. And Yona remembers another thing; the scratch of Curtis's coat against her forehead, him holding her and Timmy tight, the smell of the blood dripping out of his mangled wrist after his hand got detached, leaning his forehead against Dad's, the small smile of relief on his tear-streaked face, borrowing her head into his shoulder right before the shock wave of the blast blackened everything out.

"Curtis," Yona says softly, clears her scratchy voice and says it louder. "Curtis?"

Maybe she imagines the hand getting even more animated.

     She starts kicking at the impenetrable metal wall over the hand. The pipe clangs and sparks as it makes contact. She suddenly has an idea, and lines the pipe against the small space the hand is dangling out of. Lines a piece of rubble the size of nine protein bars stacked against each other three by three and places the pipe on top to act as a lever. She throws her entire weight on top of the exposed end, and pushes down. The scaffold of metal slowly unravels in front of her, bending upwards and away to reveal a pile of rubble burying a coat-clad arm and torso. She and Timmy scramble to remove the chunks of rock and debris away to reveal someone, a man, miraculously breathing.

     Curtis's shocked blue eyes greet them when they clear out more of the junk, dust coating his entire face and a nasty gash running across his neck. His lips are pale and thin, his mouth shut like he's trying not to breath. His right hand is stretched as far as it can go, the fingers still grasping outwards at them.

     They drag him out in a burst of energy, Yona grasping his fingers and not letting go this time. He doesn't make a single sound, just lies there, the rest of his body stiff and inflexible, until she prods at his left leg and he shouts out a cry of pain.

 "Hurts," he mutters softly, tears filling his eyes. He looks at them with wonder then, perhaps fear, as if comprehending finally, what has happened.

"Alive", he whispers, coughing at the dust, his eyes greedily taking in Timmy's face as he grips her hand as tight as he can, just before he passes out.

 

***

  

He's too heavy for the two of them to move anywhere. Timmy tells her Curtis's leg isn't broken.

     She gets startled by him saying that, her senses too overwhelmed by the endless cravings and the headache she's nursing from her withdrawal; realises she is way out of her league here. She knows what dancing feels like two carriages away; she doesn't know the first thing about caring for another human being.

"How do you know?" she asks him.

"Mummy told me," he replies earnestly. It makes more sense to her than anything else in this world.

     They scout the rubble for anything warm, clothes or blankets or rubber, anything that could be an insulator. But it's all been burned out. Timmy starts lining up little concrete rocks to form a wall either side of Curtis and Yona helps him once she realizes what he's doing. She tears out a chunk of her coat and wraps the bloodied stump with it. It’s too cold for the blood to drip out, but she feels so hot and feverish that she’s glad to get rid of part of the garment anyway.

     After that, they're lost. Yona doesn't have one fucking clue about what to do next, and a particularly strong craving hits her right inside her nose and throat just as it starts to get dark. Timmy looks up at her hopefully, like she might know all the answers, and then cowers away when she snatches her hand away from his. She ignores him and sniffs hard, searching for just a mite of blue dust to help her. She drags her hand through the rubble for a block of cronol and never finds it. In a fit of shame, she empties Curtis's pockets, tries to find a sniff of it, a smattering of powder. Nothing.

     She looks at Timmy curled up against Curtis, the little boy softly telling his unconscious companion that mummy says he'll be alright, asking him to wake up. She doesn't understand where he's getting his optimism. The cronol in her system has definitely worn off by now, her body seasoned to get rid of it quickly from years of use, and the lack of buffer is throwing her in the deep end. And dad isn't there to calm her either, the way he'd been all her life. Dad and cronol, all gone, leaving everything horrible. A wave of nausea hits her and she runs outside to throw up the bile in her empty stomach.

     Which reminds her she is gnawingly hungry. Timmy probably is too, but he hasn’t said a word. He's so little and he's being so brave, Yona thinks. She’s struck for the first time with a strong sense of love, for Timmy and for Curtis, for the only two people who are alive (one of them barely), just as she is right now, for the way Timmy’s holding a three-way conversation with an unconscious Curtis and his dead mother. Laced with that is worry, worry that Curtis won’t wake up and be okay, that Timmy will be alone with her, just as it was before they found Curtis. She wishes she were stronger, physically and mentally. Timmy's not addicted to blocks of waste like she is, and he's tending to Curtis and she isn't. He's lost his mum like she lost her dad, and he's so much younger. But he isn't walking around shaking an unconscious man's coat for powder; he's just curled up against him, asking him softly to wake up. She feels awful, wants to apologise for her behaviour earlier.

Curtis will be hungry too, if he ever wakes up.

 _And it won’t matter anyway; we'll all be hungry, and we'll all be cold, and then we'll all be dead_ , a voice inside Yona’s head supplies.

     She passes out a while later, barely crawling inside the little fort of rocks Timmy's built around Curtis and himself before darkness crawls into her mind.

  

***

  

     Maybe she dreams the warmth on her face and feeling of water trickled against her parched lips. Maybe she dreams about waking up to Timmy's little hand curled against hers, telling him she's sorry, and Timmy toothily smiling at her in relief, then curling up again, whispering in a small, scared voice, "I miss mummy".

     Maybe she dreams about waking up the next time to Curtis, her entire world still bathed in a singular need for cronol, sucking in her breathe for long seconds until Curtis has to shake her so she instinctively gulps in air.

The relief that he’s alive hits her like a train.

But maybe she’s only imagining him.

“All dead.”

His face crumbles as he nods his head, the tears subsiding only when Timmy runs in to hug him from behind. Maybe she imagines that.

     Maybe she imagines her father near her (“Appa?” she cries out at him), the conspiring smirk and swearing a fragile picture that dissolves quickly into bright blue.

  

***

 

     The last time she wakes up is to the sight of Curtis and Timmy together, leaning over her. The shivers rattling her body are gone.

"What happened?" she asks, her voice scratchy but her vision clear as glass.

They look at each other.

"We started a fire," Curtis tells her, the corners of his eyes crinkling into a smile.

 

 

 

_Fin._

 


End file.
